


Nothing Like A Lord

by Inkonherhands



Category: L'Homme qui rit | The Man Who Laughs - Victor Hugo, The Grinning Man - Philips & Teitler/Grose & Morris & Philips & Teitler/Grose
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:14:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25998838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkonherhands/pseuds/Inkonherhands
Summary: In the new world, Grinpayne is plagued by thoughts of who he would have become had he known his true identity all along.
Relationships: Grinpayne/Dea, Gwynplaine/Dea
Comments: 3
Kudos: 16





	Nothing Like A Lord

He’s bored. He’s so very, very bored; everything from his pianoforte in the sitting room to his library in the study filling him with nothing more than a dull greyness. He flops into a chair at the dining room table, swinging his legs over the arms in one smooth movement, and voices his grievances despairingly. The man at the head of the table raises an eyebrow, but does not look up.

“If you’re so bored you can come with me to hear the people’s complaints this afternoon.”

Well. That’s not what he meant at all.

He tells his father so, voice curving upward in a pitiful whine, but his father simply turns a page of his book and motions a servant for more tea. 

“If you’re going to inherit my estate,” he says calmly, “you had better start learning how to run it. Listening to the people is a part of that duty.”

“But they’re so ugly and pathetic, Father” he points out, rising from the dining table only to collapse dramatically on his back in the window seat. “It makes me feel truly ill to be near them, you can’t expect me to endure it.”

“I don’t just expect you to, I’m ordering you to.” His father says, in the tone that allows no further argument, and he tips his head back with a groan of resignation. The day, already dreary, has just been utterly ruined.

***

The chair in the welcoming chamber is stiff and rigid, and he has to sit with his hands neatly folded in his lap and his feet firmly on the floor. He fidgets uncomfortably, eyeing the grounds outside the window with bitter longing and only stopping his squirming at a sharp glance from his father. The older man raises a hand, ushering the next pitiful creatures forward to moan and gripe about some trivial matter or other, and he keeps from rolling his eyes only with monumental effort. 

The family that step forward is small, just an old, weary man and a young girl with the most peculiar silvery-white hair holding onto his arm. They’re both filthy, of course - peasants always are - but at least the girl seems to have made something of an effort to not appear utterly despondent, with a light purple crocheted cloak of sorts hanging over the usual assortment of rags that always turns his stomach to look at. He leans forward slightly as the man coughs and bows before speaking. 

“My lord, I come to you with a plea on behalf of my daughter. I am a potion-maker, and I rely on certain ingredients to brew not just the tonics that I sell at market but also the medicine that will keep sickness at bay when the winter comes.” He pauses, hesitating. “The harvest has been poor this year, my lord, as I’m sure you know, and I’ve been unable to source many of the ingredients I need. Without them, our income has suffered, and I have no medicine for my daughter.” He pulls his daughter forward slightly, and she looks up towards where the Lord and his son sit with a blank expression. Rude child, he thinks, to not have the decency to look her benefactors in the face.

“She is already blind, your lordship. A small donation from the grace of your heart would go towards making sure she suffers no further.” 

Ah. That explains the blank stare, at least. He turns to see what his father will make of this wretched man and his defective daughter, but to his surprise when he looks over he finds those familiar cold eyes already turned on him. 

“My son is learning the intricacies of managing an estate,” his father says coolly, addressing the peasants without looking at them. “He will respond to your plight as he sees fit.”

He turns, surprised, to look back at the peasants whose fortune he now apparently holds in his hands. A flicker of something crosses the old man’s face, so fast he almost misses it… but not fast enough. It was a flash of offence, of irritation, plain as day. He narrows his eyes. So this pauper thinks he’s not good enough to preside over them as his father does? Very well. 

He sits up straighter, lifting his chin. 

“You say you’re a potion maker?”

“That’s right, my, uh, my lord,” the man says, bowing his head slightly in deference, but not nearly as deep a bow as he gave his father. Hesitating over his title too, the nerve of it.

“Well then, what will you do with any money we give you?” He scoffs, leaning forwards. “Buy medicine from your competitors?”

“If that’s what it takes, then yes” The old man says through gritted teeth, glaring up at him as though he has any right to be so insolent. His heart, already hardened, grows icy.

“And how much money, exactly, would you be asking for?”

The man starts to speak, but he cuts across him.

“And how much will the man after you ask for, who is also living through the bad harvest? And the man after him, and after him?” 

The peasant at this point is growing red with rage, but in response he simply smiles sweetly; the picture of innocence. 

“We help those who are needy, sir, not those who have simply failed to plan for a bad season. If your daughter grows sick, you have nothing to blame but your own poor preparation. Good day.”

He turns to gauge his father’s reaction, but a voice rings out, snatching his attention back. 

“You know nothing of darkness.” 

It’s the girl with the strange silver hair, her eyes milky-white with blindness more visible now as she steps out of her father’s grasp into a beam of light falling through the window. She smiles, and he feels his blood begin to boil as she continues. “You know nothing of pain, or suffering, and therefore you know nothing of the world. You cannot govern that which you do not know, and it will be your downfall.”

Her voice is soft, but he could not be struck more dumb if she had shouted. His mouth hangs open for a moment. 

“How dare you speak to me like that?” he hisses, rising from his seat even as the old man pulls the girl back hurriedly. “Do you not comprehend who I am? How much power I have over you? What I could do to you?” 

The old man is stammering apologies, all insolence wiped from his face now, but it is too little, too late. He chances a look at his father, who is frowning but making no move to intervene. Perfect. 

“In fact,” he says, emboldened by the knowledge that he truly has been entrusted with power over these two miserable creatures at least. “I think a display of insolence like yours should be made an example of. I won’t stand for it, before _or_ after I inherit this estate.”

The old man starts begging, pleading, knowing what’s about to come, but he holds up a hand and two guards stride forward to silence him. They pull him struggling away from the girl who now stands alone, blind and with no one to guide her. The chamber falls silent. He sits down once more, taking a moment to adjust his gown before leaning forward, savouring the weight of the words on his tongue. 

“You’re going to die come winter anyway, according to your father. I’m simply speeding up the process.”

He smiles widely, baring his teeth like a wolf. 

“Take her to be hanged.”

***

He’ll be reprimanded for this later, he knows that. But it’s not as though his father will make a scene here in court by jumping to the rescue of this one peasant girl, and besides, she was the last straw in an utterly miserable day. In his mind hanging is a perfectly reasonable punishment, and it will at least mean the evening will be at least partly salvaged with some mild entertainment. 

He leans back, waiting for the inevitable screaming and wailing and begging that usually follows a proclamation like this. 

But it never comes.

Instead, the peasant girl looks him in the eye, and says his name.

Well, almost says it. She gets stuck on the first syllable, her pretty little mouth curving in all the wrong ways, lips turning out when they should be turning in. Truth be told, she’s butchering it, really, and he almost laughs. ‘Grinpayne’, as though she can’t even speak-

She says it again, insistent, and he frowns. This is not how it is supposed to go. She is supposed to scream and cry and struggle, fighting his soldiers as they drag her out into the streets where she belongs, and instead she’s ruining it all, standing there so brazenly and butchering a perfectly good lordly name-

Grinpayne, says Dea. 

He freezes.

Her name is Dea.

The girl he knows, the girl he loves. The girl he has just ordered to be executed. 

Her name is Dea. 

His world explodes in pain, and he wakes up screaming.

***

For a short while after he wakes, all Grinpayne can focus on is agony. With nothing to numb it besides Dea’s calming voice and tight grip on his trembling hands, the pain is excruciating, but it passes relatively quickly. He’s growing stronger, faster now at recovering than those first few weeks after they’d left Catherine Palace; weeks that Grinpayne barely remembers and Dea refuses to talk about; weeks where the pain had been so bad he’d struggled even to breathe for hours at a time. Now, it is only a few minutes before his nerves stop screaming and he’s able to unclench his taut muscles slightly, to relax a little into Dea’s patient embrace. She brushes the sweat-soaked hair from his forehead and presses a kiss there before resting her own brow against his and nuzzling his nose, her arms wrapped around his neck. 

“What did you dream of?” she breathes, and he shudders slightly. He’d been so focused on fighting the wave of pain that he’d almost forgotten the hideous vision he’d been ripped from. 

“I was a lord.” He says slowly, and she laughs softly. 

“You _are_ a lord,” she reminds him, but he grimaces, shaking his head and pulling away from her a little. 

“I dreamed that I… that I grew up as a lord. In a palace. My parents were alive, and I’d never been cut, and I…” he trails off, unable to voice it. Dea frowns.

“And you…?” She prompts gently

He allows himself to look at her, the moonlight lighting her hair up silvery white. She is almost otherworldly in her beauty, an angel in the bed of a monster, and it cuts him to his core.

“I was so cruel” he whispers, the word lodging in his throat and breaking as it comes out. “I was spoilt and petulant, and…”

She takes his hand in hers, raising it to her lips and pressing a soft kiss to the back of his knuckles. 

“What happened, Grinpayne?” She asks, her voice not a breath above a murmur. He swallows. 

“You came to ask us for help, you and Ursus, to ask for aid after a poor harvest, and my father instructed me to make the decision, and I… I said…” 

He can’t repeat it, he can’t tell her what he did, but she’s waiting, so lovely in the moonlight, so trusting, and he never could lie to her. He takes a shaking breath, closing his eyes and realising as he does so that his lashes are wet. 

“I sentenced you to hang, Dea. Because I was bored, because I _could_. I-” his breath catches, a sob choking him. He opens his eyes, forcing himself to look at the pained face of his love as a stray tear slips over the jagged grooves of his cheek. “I _executed_ you.”

She shakes her head; a tiny movement in the dark of their room.

“My love, it was just a dream. I’m right here.”

“But what if that’s what I would have become?” he hisses, desperate for her to understand for once the beast that he’s always known he must be, the monster everyone else can see slashed across his face as plain as day. “If I’d grown up in the court, who’s to say I wouldn’t have been like that? Who’s to say I wouldn’t have done that to you?”

“You would never have been a man like that, Grinpayne.” She says firmly, gripping his hands more tightly in her own. “Your parents were good people, they would have raised you to be a fair ruler-”

“My parents lived on an estate while people like your mother froze in the snow, Dea, I inherited a _castle_ for god’s sake-”

“Your parents were killed because they fought that system, Grinpayne!” She interrupts, her voice rising as she refuses to allow him to talk over her. “They were kind and fair and just; everyone who knew them has told us so. You of all people should know titles aren’t everything, Grinning Man. Don’t discredit their memory because of their position. ”

She reaches up and cradles his cheek in her hand, and he can’t stop himself leaning into her touch, even as guilt rages through him. She wipes her thumb over his cheekbone, frowning unhappily at the wetness she finds there. “Your only experience of the court was at Catherine Palace.” She says slowly, firmly, as though teaching something to a small child. “The people you met there were spoiled and thoughtless because they were the children of an awful man, the man your parents died fighting, and even _his_ children were made better by meeting you.” She moves her hand from his cheek to press against his bare chest, right over his heart. 

“You’re a good man, Grinpayne. In this life and in every life.”

He says nothing, not trusting himself to speak as she shifts forward and pulls him into her embrace. He tries to resist, but her touch is intoxicating and he can’t help himself; he ducks his head and curls into her like a child, pressing his nose into the crook of her neck as she runs her fingers through his hair soothingly, teasing out the tangles in his curls. After a while she gently shifts them both down in the bed so that they’re lying flat once more, limbs entwining automatically. He traces the edge of her jaw with his finger. She is so beautiful.

“I will never deserve you, Dea. In any life.”

She silences him with a kiss, and it is softness and kindness and goodness in a single touch. When sleep takes them both once again he dreams not of palaces or princes but of her, his Beauty, his love, his own soul. In this life. In every life. For ever.

**Author's Note:**

> Thinking about how Grinpayne’s only experience of young lords/highborns who grew up in court would have been Josiana and Dirry-Moir, and how our self-destructive anxious boy would definitely have questioned his character identity if he grew up in the same system as they did. Thanks @ratcarney on tumblr for inspiring me to write again and actually finish this drabble that’s been sitting in my notes. Set in the new world which you know means that sweet sweet crimson lethe withdrawal….


End file.
